Specific B2B marketing initiatives to use during a challenging economy

There have been a number of articles and blog posts in past few months on B2B marketing in a recession. What I wanted to do in this post is discuss specific initiatives marketers can undertake, I’ll likely follow-up with a series that includes the following:

• Using lead scoring to identify high potential opportunities for sales to focus on
• Ways to make the most of your lead database or house list
• Developing targeted nurturing programs for prospects and existing customers
• Improving lead capture rates through creative multimedia based registration
• Delivering compelling customer testimonials for prospects late in the buying cycle and looking for reassurance

Today I’ll focus on “Using lead scoring to identify high potential opportunities for sales”. Tim created a whitepaper on the topic of lead scoring that has a lot of good information if you’re looking for details. I would outline the steps to follow as:

1. Get agreement between Sales and Marketing on what factors determine the value of a lead
2. Focus outbound lead generation and media on audiences that match these factors
3. Make sure you’re collecting the necessary information from leads to score them
4. Firm up the sales follow-up process for leads
5. Put a plan in place to nurture or follow-up with people that aren’t ready for sales today

Define Your Lead Scoring Criteria with Marketing AND Sales
Defining your lead score requires sales and marketing to work together. The best thing, which we’ve found very useful when we’ve faciliated it for clients, is to get key sales and marketing stakeholders together in a room. The key thing to get to is what specifically makes a lead a good lead, from the standpoint of attributes that make a lead worth follow-up and evaluation by Sales. These tend to be title, industry, company size, etc. This discussion should also include which factors should be weighted higher, from this you can define the scoring crtiertia or formula that sets the threshold that triggers acceptance of a lead by Sales.

Adapt your Marketing to your Lead Scoring Criteria
Once you’ve defined what is a good lead and what isn’t this should be something that is fed back into promotional plans. What can you do to better target your media budget to get to the right prospects? On your web site, what can you do to better highlight or promote content that applies to the segements identified as higher value?

Capture the Information to Score your Leads
Your lead generating assets on your web site needs to ask questions that captures information about these agreed-upon factors. Be careful not to ask for too much information at one time, but recognize that, without the core information, you can’t score as effectively and your sales team can’t really follow up effectively. Take a simple example of your newsletter, which may only ask for e-mail and name to maximize your subscription base. You need to have a plan through your newsletter efforts to get people to content that is of high value and captures the additional information you need to score leads so sales can follow up on those that cross the agreed-upon lead score treshold.

Review the Sales Follow-up Process
Going through the exercise of agreeing on your lead scoring criteria should help improve communication between marketing and sales. Also, keep in mind that once a lead is accepted by Sales from a systems standpoint, it then goes through some sales qualification. You should put metrics in place that measure how many leads sent from Marketing are followed up on and which ones are rejected so you can determine why and put a nurturing plan in place where appropriate. To get some ideas going on this front I’d recommend a webinar from Tony Jaros of Sirius Decisions that is referenced in this blog post. Some of the future posts related to this topic will go into more detail.

Nurture Leads that Aren’t Ready for Sales Today
Lead marketing and promotion efforts are generally driven by our timeline instead of the lead or prospect’s timeline (this doesn’t apply to all on-demand efforts). For example, if you have a product launch on August 1st, that happens to be the timeframe when you will have signficant marketing activity for your product. You’ll spend some money, generate some interest and get lots of leads. But the issue is that a very small percentage (probably less than 1% but could be as high as 5%, if you’re fortunate) of the leads will be at the right stage in their buying process at that exact point in time. They’re just not ready to purchase then. The key thing to do here is to make sure you stay top of mind and continue to educate and engage these leads or prospects so when they are ready to evaluate your product or services or to make purchase they can do so. This is where newsletters, and nurturing tracks based on a lead’s interest area come in. Also, provide ways for people to let you know when they are ready to evaluate or make a decision. I’ll write more about this in the next post on specific ideas to make use of your house list, but for now you can read a description and results of an effort we undertook to provide a hand raising opporutnity for leads that we valued but weren’t ready for Sales when we first enaged them.